NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M, Fastest Notebook GPU Yet

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Unigine and H.A.W.X. Testing

Unigine Heaven v.20 Benchmark

Synthetic DirectX 11 Gaming

Unigine Heaven

The Unigine Heaven Benchmark v2.0 is built around the Unigine game engine. Unigine is a cross-platform real-time 3D engine, with support for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. The Heaven benchmark, when run in DX11 mode, also makes comprehensive use of tessellation technology and advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion), and it also features volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm and a dynamic sky with light scattering. In other, non-geek speak lingo, cutting-edge DX11 graphics are on display in this test.

In this test, we've set the Unigine engine to employ a moderate level of tessellation effects when rendering its scenes. Tessellation functions are a strong suite for NVIDIA's Fermi architecture and in general NVIDIA's tessellation engine in GeForce GTX 400 series GPUs is significantly stronger than that of AMD's Radeon HD 5000 series. Though this test only employs a moderate level of tessellation, the GeForce GTX 480M offered ~ 25 - 30% higher frame rates versus the AMD's fastest mobile GPU currently.

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X

DX10.1 Flight Simulator Benchmark

H.A.W.X.

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. is an aerial warfare video game that takes place during the time of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. Players have the opportunity to take the throttle of over 50 famous aircrafts in both solo and 4-player co-op missions, and take them over real world locations and cities in photo-realistic environments created with the best commercial satellite data.

H.A.W.X. is more of a straight-up DirectX 10 title and AMD specifically spent time tuning it for its DX10.1 rendering path as a showcase for their early lead in the technology. As a result, this specific benchmark shows a much tighter spread with only a minor, frankly negligible edge afforded to the new GeForce GTX 480M.